Chapter Five begins with Sophie desperately wanting to stay.
The only thing to do, Sophie decided, was to show Howl that she was an excellent cleaning lady, a real treasure. She tied an old rag round her wispy white hair, she rolled the sleeves up her skinny old arms and wrapped an old tablecloth from the broom cupboard round her as an apron….She grabbed up a bucket and besom and got to work. [63]
In checking my notes and my favorite books of folk tale/fairy tale interpretation for this post, I got merrily caught up in Clarissa Pinkola Estes’s chapter in Women Who Run With The Wolves on the story about the innocent girl Vasalisa and the chicken-legged house of the crone Baba Yaga. There are some compelling similarities between Vasalisa and Sophie, which once again I attribute not so much to any direct, intentional parallel, but rather to the “primordial sludge” — comprising everything she has known, learned, or read — which DWJ cited as inspiration in “The Profession of Science Fiction.”
Vasalisa began life with stepmother and stepsister problems, which in Sophie’s case are inverted/averted; however, she shares with Sophie a missing “positive mother,” the source of a girl’s self-esteem and ability to trust her own intuition. Although Fanny never abused Sophie in any wicked-stepmother way, there’s no denying that Sophie’s loss in infancy of her real mother, combined with her own tendency toward passivity, had in her hat shop days collapsed Sophie’s reality into practically nothing.
Vasalisa does the everyday chores without complaint. To submit without complaint is heroic-seeming, but in fact causes more and more pressure and conflict between the two oppositional natures, one too-good and the other too-demanding….At this point a woman begins to lose her psychic bearings. She may feel cold, alone, and willing to do anything to bring back the light again. This is just the jolt the too-nice woman needs to continue her induction into her own power. One might say that Vasalisa has to go meet the Great Wild Hag because she needs a good scare. [WWRWTW, p. 87]
We’ve already seen Sophie longing for something more to life as she dutifully trims hats all day and far into the night. We’ve seen her so deeply compliant and resigned that the Hag, the Witch of the Waste, finally had to come to her. Having been jolted from her passivity by the Witch’s curse, we’ve seen Sophie leave home and shop and set out into the Wild — willing, as night comes down cold and windy, to take her chances with Wizard Howl’s Castle because there’s fire and light inside.
(Miyazaki’s version even helpfully puts the castle on giant biomechanical chicken legs.)
At this point, DWJ begins departing from the old story, inverting it. In the folk tale, Vasalisa’s family send her to Baba Yaga seeking fire, an errand which they assumed and hoped would be the end of Vasalisa. Upon meeting her, Baby Yaga then strikes a Rumpelstiltskin-esque bargain with the girl — she will give Vasalisa the magical fire in return for impossible fairy-tale household chores such as sorting mounds of poppy-seeds from mounds of dirt before dawn. There will also be sweeping and laundry to do. But Baba Yaga doesn’t live in Howl’s Moving Castle. There is an enchanted fire at the heart of it, but rather than passively waiting to be stolen, this fire has drawn Sophie there and and allowed her to enter.
As far as the sweeping and washing go, the resident bachelors don’t demand it in return for lodging. In fact, they insist they don’t even want it. [62] Yet Sophie throws herself into it with a wild, mad joy. For now it’s what she is choosing to do, and for someone who for so long had felt so trapped, that means the world.
Among the Frogs 